From the Novel Call It In the Air
Jo and Joe
By: Gregory Light - Jul 08, 2026
(Toronto, Canada 1972)
College Days. And then a flood of warm nostalgia. It startled Joey, catching him unaware, the unlikely cause tumbling out of a two-day-old edition of The Times which he'd dragged out of the dustbin after breakfast. He had purchased the newspaper on his way back from the aborted lunch with McDougal but had been too incensed to read it. Now it sat on his lap, jolting his memory and attaching his attention to a short, news-in-brief item at the bottom of the page.
'Amazing!’ he said to himself, re-reading the short paragraph a half dozen times. His mind resisted. So, too, did his voice, turning up the volume and shifting into a long, drawn-out 'naaaaahhh. Not in The Times for God sake!' But the names were unquestionably the same. And the title was next to impossible to forget. Still, after ten years? He leaned back in his chair. 'Why not? Yeah, why not?' His lips suddenly broke into a wide, beaming smile. 'Effing A!' he blurted out under his breath, then he exploded into a spontaneous laugh that made the newspaper snap, crackle and pop like an over-enthusiastic bowl of Rice Krispies.
'Effing A!' he repeated, this time loudly; immediately catching himself. Amy? Joanna had already scolded him several times for swearing in front of Amy. He looked momentarily around the room. Very English; the gas fire set into a garishly tiled, once attractive Edwardian fireplace, was seething frantically at the February weather—cold but the rain had stopped. Amy wasn't there. He listened. Nothing for a moment, then a happy gurgle from the kitchen where he'd left her contentedly drawing. She was making tracings of the cover of one of his "junk books": Photographs of History Before the Camera, picked it up for £1.89 in a sale at Foyles. It turned out to be a collection of colour glossies depicting staged historical incidents, most of which looked like direct steals from Madame Tussaud’s.
Joey returned to the short item in the newspaper. It truly was amazing. After ten years. He let the memories come, quiet and warm. College days. The University of Toronto. Names trickled back: Gary, McDougal, Higgins, the Maitlands, Fleming, Bradley ... and Joanna. Joanna. He smiled. What a way to meet.
Summer semester, 1972. 10 p.m. Joey seated at his desk in residence, an ‘all-nighter’ ahead of him. But nothing so trivial as an essay. He was facing five thousand flips of his penny. He braced himself. The fact he wouldn't finish his task until long after morning was a sobering thought. Too sobering. He was about to toss the penny when he had a sudden urge for a drink; a beer to be precise. Procrastination Joey referred to as thirst. To be fair he decided to let the coin decide. 'Tails I stay. Heads I go. One beer.' It was a slightly loaded decision as his books showed after almost two-fifths of a million tosses, heads led by a tiny percentage. The three hundred and ninety-four thousand, six hundred and eighty-first toss went with the majority. He put a mark in the "George" book and went out for one beer.
Now, there is something in "one beer" that has unlikelihood baked into it, especially for undergraduates. It was an unlikelihood Joey refrained from challenging. He had just taken a sip of his second pint when he spotted Joanna coming out of the women's washroom. Joanna. Lovely, graceful, and alleged to be intelligent; she belonged to that exotic breed of student who skimmed across the surface of the larger universities (U of T: population circa 50,000) on the verge of taking off into student stardom. A sub-culture within a sub-culture?1972 still being the "Sixties".
Joey had spoken to her once, a few weeks earlier, but he didn't know her. Far more accurate to say he knew of her. Her name popped up in more conversations than he cared to remember; largely all-male colloquiums sustained deep into the night on "2-4s" and focusing on her "physicals" as McDougal liked to call them. Especially on her legs.
'On her legs from the waist down,' McDougal qualified. McDougal was a hard-line anti-Cartesian, whole-heartedly rejecting the faintest whiff of dualism. In George's universe, the mind simply did not exist, except in his own which was one track.
To Joey's amazement, Joanna's face was just considered pretty. Pretty? She was "stunning". What's wrong with these guys, he wondered. Are they blind? "A very Canadian loveliness" was the remark that had irritated him the most. He might have considered it a low form of sarcasm had anyone, but Bradley made it. McDougal bellowed that the statement was a contradiction in terms.
'Let's face it, she has spectacular legs, but a so-so body,' McDougal liked big breasts on women, 'And a face. Everything else is irrelevant.'
Joey knew McDougal liked to be provocative when he preached. He had asked him more than once to stop baiting everyone with his juvenile comments. Regarding Joanna, he became threatening, refusing to put up with negative or even slightly disparaging remarks. McDougal had backed down, his three-fingered hand fidgeting, reminding Joey of a nervous, three-legged dog loping away from a confrontation.
McDougal's vanquished expression passed through Joey's mind a few weeks later when he saw Joanna come out of the women’s washroom. He watched her with short, timid glances as she picked her way through the maze of packed tables crammed into the student pub. She had no idea of the stand he'd made on her behalf. He had defended her, he mused. Even championed her. But when he realized her path was about to bring her past his table, he froze nervously. He looked down at his beer, shielding his face, his glances shorter and spliced with longer intervals. After all, it wasn't as if they were total strangers. They had spoken once before; five days ago, in the college cafeteria when, Joanna, more gorgeous in person, joined a few of her friends at a table that Joey happened to be sharing. Unprepared for this stroke of amazing luck, Joey had jumped into their discussion, his words (however affectionately inspired) bubbling out with no idea what he was doing. He tried to be witty, but it turned out, at Joanna's expense.
Explaining to her friends that the paper she was writing for her Philosophy course was about "conspiracy theories", Joanna had quickly sketched an elaborate argument popular with undergraduates at the time) that current history was no more than controlled events, planned and executed by agencies like the C.I.A. and the K.G.B. Joey had innocently (he thought) added the S.P.C.A.
'I'm serious,' Joanna said, glaring at him angrily.
'So am I,' said Joey, as surprised as anyone that he'd said it. Having said it, however, he didn't know how to stop without looking foolish. Joanna's aggrieved snub tingling in his skin, he continued. 'I mean it's presumptuous enough to define history so narrowly as to exclude the Third World and the working classes; now you also want to make it human-centric?' He then went on to improvise an argument on behalf of the animal kingdom, listing the key historical influences by such notables as Hannibal’s elephants, Nixon's dog Checkers and Alexander the Great’s horse Bucephalus, stopping just short of throwing in the Trojan Horse. 'Can we be sure that Alexander would have conquered half the then-known world if he hadn't been riding Bucephalus? Not to mention Aristotle. How has the history of thought been shaped by Aristotle's observation of that animal's relationship with his pupil? And Nixon? It's pretty well accepted he wouldn't be President today without Checkers. That speech was his turning point.'
'All right!' Joanna interjected irritably. She didn't know whether to take Joey seriously. 'Maybe there are cases of animal involvement in history, but I fail to see what they have to do with the S.P.C.A.'
'Well, if you believe in your conspiracy theory?'
'I didn't say it was my theory.'
'Okay, whatever; but if you accept it and the historical role of animals, then you can hardly believe that the powers that be would ignore the societies that exercise control over these animals.'
For a long moment, nobody said anything. The air was, to say the least, unreceptive. His link to the S.P.C.A. was patent nonsense. Groundless rubbish. Still, he half contemplated fabricating a newspaper account of K.G.B. infiltration of Washington via a Siamese homing kitten, trained in Morse code and offered to a highly placed Senator as a gift. It was no more far-fetched than real C.I.A. plans to knock off Castro over the years. But how far was he willing to take this charade? It wasn't an end-in-itself. The objective had been meeting Joanna.
'Of course,' he said finally, groping for a way out which would oblige Joanna but would not be a surrender on his part, 'it depends on whether you hold a strong or weak version of the theory. A weak version would not ?'
But it was too late. Joanna had already broken free. Sensing the cul-de-sac into which Joey had led them, she decided to let the exchange drop. 'I wish I had more time,' she said, 'but I have a class. Perhaps another time?' She smiled politely and began to get up from the table.
Joey was completely taken aback. Another time? What was that supposed to mean? When? Where? Two women in her group rose with her. God, Joey thought suddenly, I'm a leper. Why? He thought the discussion had gone well. Not perfect, perhaps, but now here she was, bowing out before the end. What about a future date? She had promises to keep. At least an address or a telephone number.
'Wait!'
The urgency of the request caught Joanna and her friends about twenty feet from the table. They stopped and turned around. Several students nearby also looked at Joey. With seven or eight pairs of eyes suddenly on him, Joey froze.
'Yes?' Joanna said after a second.
'Uh, nothing,’ he retreated. ‘Just thanks for the conversation.'
'You're welcome.' she replied, almost smiling.
'Weird,' Joey heard one of her friends say as they left.
'You're not kidding,' the other was saying. 'You know, I think I know that guy. I'm almost sure it's the same guy. What was his name? Did you catch it?'
'No.'
'I'm sure it's him.' Joey strained to hear. For all he knew they were sealing his fate with Joanna. And he couldn't defend himself. '... two whole hours ... the police treating us like ... it must be the same guy ...' Just snatches of sentences. They were on the other side of the cafeteria now. 'Asshole!' was the last thing he heard. He felt like jumping up and chasing them, begging Joanna not to listen. I'm being framed, he thought, slouching back glumly in his chair.
'Nice looking woman, isn't she?' The guy who had remained at the table was looking at Joey.
'What?'
'Joanna?'
'Oh her?' Joey said, shrugging as impassively as he could. 'Not bad. Nice legs I suppose.'
'Was that on the level? About the S.P.C.A?'
'No, not at all. That was?' he regretted the words the moment his mouth began the sentence. He wasn't prone to making up stories, but when he did, it was not one of his policies to let on that they were untrue. He had no desire to be known as a chronic liar.
'Liar!!' Joanna whispered viciously as she passed his table in the pub five days later.
‘Liar.’ It was the same thing Gary had said. They were sitting in the residence common room. ‘Why would you start by lying to her? It doesn’t make any sense.’ He had tried to be sympathetic, but Joey didn’t get it. He was still trying to defend himself. Gary had finally said, ‘Look, man, if she is lucky, she will never see you again.’
But she wasn’t lucky. ‘Liar!’ Joanna said again, she leaned down towards him and raised her voice slightly. In case he had not heard the first time. Her irritation was a direct hit. It caught Joey completely unaware, half a mouthful of beer still on its way down his throat. He couldn't believe she'd even recognized him, let alone stopped. 'What?' he spluttered, almost choking. His eyes swelled with tears as he strained to contain an eruption of coughs and swilled beer. I'm going to die, he thought. Or she's going to kill me. The look in her eyes was the dark side of murderous. The pressure in his chest subsided. Joanna didn't.
'The S.P.C.A., that's what,' she said, her eyes flashing.
'Oh that,' Joey said weakly, trying to toss it off as trivial and long forgotten.
'Oh, that! I felt like a complete fool because ...' she stumbled; he waited, 'because of someone like ... like you.'
It was the ugly, distasteful way she pronounced: "you". It set Joey off. 'You felt like a fool? I'll tell you why you felt like a fool. Do you want to know why? Because you sounded like one. If you can't string a coherent argument together, don't bother. Just rely on your beauty. You’d get a better response.' He sat back and tried to down the rest of his beer in one gulp. Unfortunately, half the beer missed his mouth, running down his chin and onto his shirt. Joanna, who had been on the verge of slapping his face, suddenly started to laugh. Joey blushed and frantically brushed at the beer on his chest. 'Okay, you win,' he said without looking at her.
'What?'
'You win,' he paused, his tone softening, 'Look, I'd appreciate it if you'd leave me alone.'
'Why should I? This table isn't your property.'
'Oh, God!' Joey moaned. 'Listen, I'm sorry. I'm sorry about the S.P.C.A. I'm sorry about my remarks about your—'.
‘About what?’ She was staring at him.
About … you know … your looks. Anyway, I’m sorry, I just want to be alone.'
'Well, I don't think you should get off that easily,' and she slid into the chair directly across from him.
Joey couldn't believe what was happening. Five minutes earlier, surreptitiously watching her pick her way through the tables, he had daydreamed about asking her to join him. Now here she was sitting across the table. He couldn't have planned it more perfectly?well maybe a little more perfectly?even if it had been a conspiracy. Which is exactly what Joanna wanted to talk about. Thankfully. He had been a total idiot, and she was letting him off. Her mind was still on her essay. They ordered a round and she launched into her thesis. It had something to do, he thought, with the notion that history was on the verge of being a science, like physics, and thus subject to the same exploitation. He would not have staked his life on it though.
'Well, it's a philosophical dispute.' He always said this when he wasn't exactly sure what had been said.
'If you like?'
'I do.’ And then, for no reason he could think of, he added ‘you remind me of Sarah?' It just popped out.
'Who's Sarah?'
'My grandmother. She pays my tuition so long as I maintain a B average. Beautiful woman. You remind me of her, that’s all.
‘You said she was beautiful. Is that just a line you use?”
‘No, no, never.’ The idea horrified him. He ordered another round.
‘So, my essay,’ Joanna continued. While she spoke, he gazed at her, fascinated by the beautiful shapes created by the movement of her mouth; her tongue all the while, dancing seductively between her teeth. One, two, three, four, five?he quietly counted the number of times her tongue touched her teeth as she spoke. He found it incredibly sensual. Somewhere in the thirties, his eyes slipped away from her soliloquy for a disguised glance at her figure. What had McDougal said? So-so? He was insane. Joanna adjusted herself, leaning forward towards him. His mind had been away for a long time.
'You're not even listening to me!' she said flicking a finger against his cheek.
Joey immediately snapped into focus. Had he blown it? 'Of course, I was,' he protested. 'I was thinking about what you were saying.' He took refuge in a sip of beer. 'But I can't fully agree with it,' he said wiping foam from his lip. 'Even physics is suspect. Read Heisenberg.'
The remark seemed to satisfy Joanna; except that neither she nor Joey could say anything specific about Heisenberg. Joey at least had the foresight to say that he had a chapter in a book he could show her. They could settle the dispute then and there. Finally, Joanna thought. They made their way hand in hand—to steady one another Joey explained—back to his room in residence.
'What's your name, anyway? I mean what do friends call you?' he asked Joanna as they entered his room.
'Jo.'
'No,' he chuckled, 'I meant your name, not mine.'
'That is mine. It's short for Joanna.'
'No kidding? That's my name also. Ah-ha! Coincidence!' he cried, grinning, and flopping down on his bed.
Joanna grinned also. She kicked off her shoes and sat down beside him. 'If you like?' she said looking across at him, her eyes gently describing him. Tall, slim, verging on too slim. Unruly, unevenly cut, brown hair; tinkering blue eyes; quirky nods of the head; out-of-fashion jacket; lonely, determinedly protective. But cute. She leaned toward him, stroked his hair gently and kissed him. His lips were strangely sweet with the taste of beer.
'Jo and Joe,' Joey murmured, putting his arm around her neck, and drawing her down against his chest. ‘There must be something in that.’
'If you say so,' Joanna said, smiling and hugging him back.